Thirteen Things You Might Not Know About The Female Condom

Every so often the Miri Signal goes up in the sky and I am called to defend the existence of female condoms. If this Daily Dot piece feels familiar, that may be because it was partially cribbed from a piece I wrote last year.

A female condom.
Yes, it looks weird. But so do all condoms.

Every so often, a prominent website devoted to “women’s issues” will post an article about how female condoms are terrible and ugly and totally unsexy and you shouldn’t bother using them. The articles will almost always attempt unflattering comparisons offemale condoms to plastic bags and trash cans for added effect.

Last year on Jezebel, Tracie Egan Morrisey published a piece called “Stop Trying To Make Female Condoms Happen,” in which she wrote: “After never really catching on in the 30 years since its invention, the female condom has received a redesign with the hopes that women will change their minds about wanting to line their vaginas like a waste paper basket.” (The redesign had actually happened several years prior.) And in a recent xoJane article, “Anonymous” concludes:

Given the substantial developments in condom design, further investments in the female condom seem like a waste. It’s an over-engineered solution for a problem that’s already being solved much more effectively. In addition, the high individual cost of the female condom creates a significant barrier when compared to single conventional condoms. Furthermore, my lab partner pointed out, there’s really no way to discreetly carry a female condom around. So much for spontaneity.

“There’s really no way to discreetly carry a female condom around?” They’re barely bigger than the other kind.

It’s important to note that, despite their names, female condoms can be used by people who are not female, and “male condoms” can be used for sex that involves neither males nor penises. But since that’s what everyone’s calling them, those are the conventions with which I’ll stick for now.

Writers who snarkily dismiss female condoms always focus on how they look or sound and which household items they most resemble, but they rarely note some of the benefits of the admittedly funny-looking things. Here are a few:

1) Female condoms are made out of nitrile, not latex, which means that people who have latex allergies can use them.

2) And because they’re not made of latex, you can use them with oil-based lube in addition to water- and silicone-based lube.

3) Many folks with penises say that female condoms feel better than male condoms because it’s less restrictive and there’s more friction on the penis. (Others disagree. That’s okay!) And in fact, there may be more sensation for both partners because nitrile is thinner than latex.

4) With female condoms you don’t have to worry about losing your erection or having to pull out immediately after, and they’re also much less likely to come out than male condoms are to slide off.

5) Because female condoms also cover some area around the vaginal opening, STI transmission may be reduced.

6) Unlike male condoms, you can put them in hours before having sex if you don’t want to worry about it in the heat of the moment.

7) The outer ring of the female condom can stimulate the clitoris, and the inner ring can stimulate the penis. Win!

Read the rest here.

Thirteen Things You Might Not Know About The Female Condom
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Correlation is Not Causation: STI Edition

I wrote a piece for the Daily Dot about a new study on STI rates among men who hook up with men using smartphone apps, and how easy it is to misinterpret the results.

new study by the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center and UCLA suggests that men who have sex with men and use hookup apps like Grindr are significantly more likely to have gonorrhea and chlamydia than men who have sex with men but do not use such apps. But before you panic and delete Grindr from your phone lest it give you an STI, let’s look at what the study does and does not actually show.

[…]Careless headline writers frequently mix up correlation and causation, spreading misinformation and stigma. Despite Lowder’s balanced take on the study, the headline of his own piece reads, rather alarmingly, “Study Suggests Grindr-Like Apps Increase Likelihood of Sexually Transmitted Infections.” This wording implies that using such apps increases an individual’s likelihood of contracting an STI, not that, in general, people who use such apps are also more likely to have an STI. It’s a fine distinction, but an important one.

Another important distinction is whether the participants contracted the STIs during the course of the study (while using GSN apps) or just happened to have them at the time that the data was collected. Here Lowder’s article is also unclear: “Specifically, geo-social app users were 25 percent more likely than their bar hopping comrades to contract gonorrhea, and 37 percent more likely to have picked up chlamydia.” And an article about the study at Advocate is headlined, “STUDY: Smartphone Hookup App Users More Likely To Contract Sexually Transmitted Infections.”

However, the actual study notes that the participants were tested for STIs at the same time as they were asked about their sexual behavior, including the use of GSN apps. This means that they did not necessarily contract the STIs while using the GSN apps, or after having used them. The infections could have preceded the participants’ use of the apps.

This is important because it can help untangle the question of why this correlation exists, besides the obvious hypothesis that using GSN apps can actually cause people to contract STIs at higher rates than other ways of meeting sexual partners. Perhaps people who already have STIs are more interested in using the apps because of the anonymity—it’s much less scary to tell a random person you’ll never meet again that you have an STI and need to use a condom than it is to tell someone who’s embedded in your social network. Or, on the more cynical side of things, people might feel less guilty about not disclosing an STI to a random app hookup than someone they’ve met in a more conventional way.

Or, maybe people who are attracted to “wild” and “risky” sexual situations are more likely to have STIs and more likely to use GSN apps. The common factor could be impulsivity or recklessness.

Read the rest here.

Correlation is Not Causation: STI Edition